Thomas Berry, who has died aged 94, was an influential Christian philosopher who sought to shift the focus of religion from individual salvation to care of the Earth and, indeed, the universe. A Roman Catholic priest who called himself a "geologian" and advised the faithful to "put the Bible on a shelf for 20 years", he propagated his vision of a new era in which human societies would live in a mutually beneficial relationship with the natural world. His major books, The Dream of the Earth (1988), The Universe Story (with Brian Swimme, 1992), The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (1999) and Evening Thoughts: Reflection On the Earth as Sacred Community (2006), were an inspiration for both the "deep ecology" and the "creation spirituality" movements later led by writers such as Arne Naess and Matthew Fox.

Berry complained that ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide, and even genocide – but collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the extinction of the vulnerable life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself. He urged that the transformation of humanity's priorities would require what he called "the great work" in four realms of endeavour: the political and legal order; the economic and industrial world; education; and religion. He advocated concrete changes including population control, criticising the Catholic church for its grievous shortcomings in that field, and respecting and preserving the habitats of all living things as a fundamental principle.

William Nathan Berry was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, where, he recalled, childhood explorations in woods and fields led to "numinous experiences". When he was 20, he sought to remove himself from a world he found "crassly commercial" and entered a monastery of the Catholic Passionist order, taking the name Thomas. He was ordained but pursued the life of a scholar, receiving a doctorate from the Catholic University of America with a dissertation on the philosophy of history.

He went to China in 1948 to teach at Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing, but after the birth of the People's Republic the following year he returned to the US to study Chinese language and culture. After serving for three years as an army chaplain in Germany, he began teaching at St John's University and Fordham University, both in New York, where he started the doctoral programme in the history of religions and where some of his students formed a devoted coterie, focused increasingly on religion and ecology.

He was co-founder, in 1970, of the Riverdale Centre of Religious Research in the Bronx, New York, where he worked until the 1990s, organising international conferences on themes such as "Energy: Its Cosmic-Human Dimensions". Berry's influence on the spiritual ecology movement was described by Fox, its later exponent, as that of "a kind of new Moses leading all religious people out of the bondage of anthropocentrism to a land of cosmology and ecology. He leads us out of the land of 'autism' (his word) into a land of renewed communication with other beings and other species who are in fact very eager to communicate, to reveal themselves to us."

In extending his concern beyond our planet to the whole universe, which he called "the quintessence of reality", Berry exceeded the agenda of current ecological thinking. He asserted: "It is false to say that humanity is the most excellent being in the universe. The most excellent being in the universe is the universe itself." But here he was within the tradition of Teilhard de Chardin and, earlier, of Thomas Aquinas, who wrote: "God wills that humans exist for the sake of the perfection of the universe." Even earlier, an eco-Christian tradition was alive in Saint Francis of Assisi.

In defiance of his grim observations, Berry was cheerful, funny and, unusually among ecological writers, an optimist, believing that humanity, after centuries of self-centred despoliation, would eventually take its place in the larger, interdependent "communion of subjects" (ie as opposed to objects) in the cosmos. He called the coming new era of conservation the "ecozoic", following 65m years of the destructive "cenozoic" era. In his travels he often carried a dog-eared copy of Black Elk Speaks, the wisdom of a Native American whose views had prefigured his own.

Berry died in a retirement home in his birthplace. He is survived by his sister and three brothers.